Heathers

Directed by Michael Lehmann, Heathers follows Winona Ryder’s Veronica as she teams up with the edgy new kid at school (Christian Slater’s J.D.) to knock off the popular members of the titular clique. Filmmaker Lehmann, working from a script by Daniel Waters, delivers an erratically-paced yet ultimately rewarding endeavor that improves substantially as it progresses, as much of Heathers‘ first act contains an almost off-puttingly broad sensibility that threatens to overwhelm its positive attributes (eg Ryder and Slater’s winning work here). The effectiveness of certain elements within the production keeps things interesting even through the picture’s less successful stretches, to be sure, and it’s worth noting that Heathers certainly benefits from an undercurrent of pitch-black darkness that proves more and more difficult to resist (ie this is not a movie that could be made in the 21st century, certainly). The go-for-broke nature of Heathers‘ second half effectively justifies the film’s entire existence and retroactively makes everything preceding it look far better, too, with the end result a justifiable cult classic that lives up to its place as a seriously irreverent piece of work.

*** out of ****